The Worlds of Lyn Thorne-Alder

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The Aereaxerer archipelago hovers high above the Nevilla Forest, wobbling ever so slightly on stems up to a mile high. This unlikely feature is the home of the Expectant Wood serial story, available to Patreon readers.

Nimbus woke the next morning from a sleep sounder than she could remember having. Her hands tingled slightly at the poultices Cartwright had wrapped around them, but most of the pain was gone, and she had slept long and heavily in the leaf-down bed.

Cartwright had moved this and that around while they packed up, such that Nimbus now found her pack more comfortable to carry while she was fairly sure she was carrying more than she had been. They walked along under the shade of Aereaxera, the birds and lizards chirping at them in the early-morning haze.

Their walk took them further and further out past the stem of Aereaxera , past dozens and dozens of the little hezzai-ai and several other fascinating creatures. Cartwright stopped three times to gather plant bundles, which he hung off of his pack till he began to look like a sort of walking herbery.

The Tinies are creatures of the Dragons Next Door setting and are loosely based on my memories of the Borrowers books.
This was meant to be a short microfic – oops.
👾

The Tinies had lived alongside humans as long as the humans had been living in houses, and, although they were a scattered and fragmented society, they had traditions and unwritten rules that they carried from home to home and community to community, mostly carried by the old, those past their adventuring days.

I’m a bit behind on the next chapter of the Expectant Wood, so have a piece of history I wrote a while ago in the meantime.
🌋

The land was rising.

The people on the islands and the small nation of Aerax clung to whatever support they could find. The last magical explosions of the Roquelan Wars had been over for days. Nobody had expected another attack.

I don’t even remember what I wrote this for, but it suits the theme of May.
🍇

They liked their god, and so they’d kept him. Around them, the world had crumbled to pieces, the new gods, creatures like him, warring against the self-appointed protectors of humanity. In their little fort on the hill, though, they’d been drunk, happy and content to stay that way. And every season, they’d paid homage to their new god, for all he gave them.

Originally posted Aug. 8th, 2011 – reposted for Pride Month. Stranded World, the middle sister, Summer, negotiating a three-way relationship. Just a light fluffy piece on parents. 🙂 🌈 They had discussed it all beforehand. Summer’s mom was just an e-mail send. Bishop’s parents: “Dad’ll probably buy me a beer, and mom will swoon. No biggie, really.” So it was Melinda’s parents who would be tricky, and thus they managed to schedule that meeting earliest on Parents’ Weekend.

This story fits in my Toot Planet setting, although it is considerably longer than many of the “tootfics” I have written for it, a tootfic being a fiction of 500 or fewer characters.

You can see many of those tootplanet microfics here, and the hashtag, which began with Catterfly’s planetary art, here.

That being said, here’s the story.

🌌

Explorer’s Log, Planet 7-3-3

(Planetary Date 4 days)

We landed harder than planned but not quite a crash, after an EMP on the way in — or something similar enough that the effects appear identical — fried every piece of electronics not in deep storage. Landed hard but not a crash-landing; the shuttle is intact, if unflyable, and so’s the team.

Nimbus pulled her knees up to her chest and looked at Cartwright, trying to be polite but also a little worried — more than a little worried. Quite a bit concerned at his ridiculous assertion. “The watering can?” she repeated carefully. “Is Aereaxera thirsty?”

🌳 By the time Cartwright had finished pulling prickers out of her hands, Nimbus was struggling to stay awake. “It seems,” he told her, his voice far too quiet and calm, “that the poison in the prickers puts you to sleep when they are pulled out.” The thought penetrated her fog. “So that the plant could digest me better. If I struggled, I’d run into the prickers, and if I fought the prickers, they’d knock me out.”

Speaking of the Serial… ~ Nimbus let her eyes adjust to the light. The lamps marked out four walls, each maybe five paces from each other. One wall was filled with a stone contrivance of some sort that she thought was probably a hearth and fireplace. The opposite side held some sort of shelf folded up against the wall. The two remaining sides held doors, closer to her height than Cartwright’s, although the ceiling looked plenty tall for him.

Nimbus tried to scramble further up the wall, but there was still no purchase, and even the window-slit sheared of prickers offered her no easy place to put her hands. “I don’t want to come with you! My parents are right up there,” she gestured. “I want to go with my parents.”

Quizzico had no answer, so the Tigress looped a few vine-like ropes around the villain – not that Quizzico really counted as a villain, more like a nuisance prankster – and left him, thus trussed, in front of the Ninth Precinct station with a short note pinned to his costume.

I mentioned I wanted to do a Worldbuilding challenge based on the doodle challenge. inventrix made me a modified list.

Day 2 is Climate. The climate of the world around Aerax (that’s an island with a center pinacle on top of a long tree trunk, not the Space Needle) is temperate, wet, and windy, especially up on the islands. (There’s a cactus on the other side because the original challenge was “cactus”, and also because over on the far side of the mountains, the weather is much dryer.)

Aerax and the sky islands are the setting of my Patreon serial The Expectant Wood.

(Day 3 is Seasonal food/fruit)

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